End Exclusionary Zoning
Affordable Housing and Municipal Zoning
It is illegal to build affordable housing in most of Louisville. While there are a lot of contributing factors to the shortage of affordable housing in the U.S., one major reason it exists is because of policies we have intentionally put in place to reduce the supply of housing out of fear of a possible decline in property values and having to share ‘our neighborhoods’ with people of different classes and races. It is illegal to redline a map and explicitly exclude people from buying in certain neighborhoods on the basis of race, but it is a legal and widespread practice to use zoning ordinances to restrict the supply of affordable housing and so in practice to ensure high levels of racial and economic segregation.
Zoning in Louisville
Louisville’s zoning data is available online and is regularly updated. I used the most recent data available for download (it’s a little unclear if it’s from 2020 or 2022 in the documentation, but it’s recent enough for this analysis) and divided the official zoning designations into four broad categories:
- Multi-Family residential (affordable housing is legal in these areas)
- Single Family Residential (restricting housing supply by mandating single family homes of a minimum size)
- Commercial/Industrial (includes enterprise zones and anything else clearly commercial)
- Other (several very small categories that are most likely related to commercial use, although this does include the ~1 percent of land that is zoned for both commercial and residential uses)
An overview of zoning types is provided by Louisville Government, and there is also an official map with additional details.
- The overwhelming majority (73%) of Louisville’s land is reserved for single family dwellings.
- Less than 5% of Louisville’s land allows multi-family structures to be built, even if we restrict the analysis to residential land it’s only 6% of residential land that allows multi-family dwellings. In other words 94 percent of residential land in Louisville is reserved for more expensive single family units

We can also look at where multi-family dwellings are allowed. The small green patches represent multi-family housing. Typing an address into the search bar will place a marker on the map locating that address, making it easy to find the zoning for your residence.